“Quiet luxury” has become a popular trend in fashion and culture. With timeless designs, expert craftsmanship, and subtle style, quiet luxury is meant to epitomize excellence and taste, whispering “If you know, you know.”
LVMH, the world’s leading luxury conglomerate serving 75 distinct maisons, has taken a similar approach when it comes to data and AI. The company worked with Google Cloud to create a platform that could meet each maison’s unique needs. They call their approach “quiet tech.”
“We wanted to maintain the one-to-one interaction our customers expect from our maisons,” says Franck Le Moal, chief information officer at LVMH. “It’s about weaving together data and AI that connects the digital and store experiences, all while being seamless and invisible. We want our customers to get even more dedicated attention without being intrusive.”
Helping advisors help clients
Some of the earliest and most promising work has been around deepening the knowledge and capabilities of client advisors at shops like Tiffany & Co, Louis Vuitton and Sephora.
At Tiffany, each advisor has a list of clients to talk to, and now they have an AI-powered chat interface that can help surface each client’s personal tastes — and guide advisors to suitable items clients might not have even known about.
“This leaves more time for the advisor to focus on the relationship with the consumer,” Le Moal says. It also helps build deeper, lasting relationships with the brands, filling the gaps when a client advisor moves on or is unavailable.
The client advisor platform also includes store procedures and guidelines, as well as the latest product information, so advisors can quickly query details about a new season’s styles or opening and closing procedures.
Boosting productivity and collaboration
The LVMH data platform is building further opportunities for sharing technical best practices, notably around AI tools. Already across the maisons, the generative AI systems Le Moal’s team has built count more than 40,000 users per month, with more than 1.5 million monthly queries.
Finance, retail, digital, legal and HR departments are all rolling out agents for information analysis and enterprise search.
“Some of it sounds simple, but it’s really amazing stuff,” Le Moal says. “Where AI can further deepen the excellence of personalization in our customer relationships, or the operational efficiency of our teams and collaborators, that is the hallmark of LVMH teams. That’s what our technology is for.”
To hear more from Le Moal, read his complete interview on Transform with Google Cloud.